tation and adjustment may demand, Let him who is unready for such sweeping revolution withhold his hand before he begins to agitate for reform. Prejudice and philosophy do not and cannot comport with each other.

In the same manner freedom is the open boast, the watchword, and the rallying cry of all the most advanced nations of Christendom. But there is a tacit assumption in the midst of all this that the family institution must forever remain intact. It is the social idol, as royalty has been the political and the Church the religious idol of mankind. This assumption rests, as in the other cases, upon another,—namely, the utility, the indispensableness of that institution, first, to the preservation of purity in the intercourse of the sexes, and, secondly, to the proper care and affectionate culture of children, and, finally, to the protection and support of the weaker sex. Sexual purity, the preservation of offspring, and the security of the weaker sex are intuitively felt to be right and good; hence the family, it is assumed, is sacred and divine, and hence, again, that in no case must it be questioned or assailed. But freedom for the affections is liable to pass the limits of the family, and freedom (of this sort) is therefore a bad thing. Hence, at this point, a reaction against freedom.

The general human mind seldom mistakes in reasoning. The error, if there be one, is more commonly the false assumption of some fact or facts to reason from, or else incompleteness in carrying on the process to its final results. If the fact be so that purity can be cultivated and preserved, children properly reared, and women protected only in the family, all the other consequences logically follow; and there is one species of human freedom - an exception to the general estimate of that attribute of manhood—a curse and a blight instead of a blessing, a thing to be warred on and exterminated, not to be aspired after, lauded, and cherished.

It is certainly a legitimate question to ask, Is the fact really so? Are the three desiderata I have indicated only attainable through a certain existing institution which mankind have, marvellously enough, had the wisdom to establish—in the midst of their general ignorance and undevelopment in all other respects-upon precisely the right basis?

First, then, as respects the first point, the preservation of sexual purity. To determine whether perpetual and exclusive marriage is essential to that end, we must first answer the question: What constitutes purity? To this question, the common, I may say the vulgar answer, Mr. Greeley's answer, is fidelity to the marriage relation (or, in the absence of that bond, no sexual relations at all). Put into categorical formula, the two propositions are then simply as follows: 1. The marriage institution is sacred because it is indispensable to the preservation of purity. 2. Purity is the preservation of the marriage institution. Of course this rotary method of ratiocination is simply absurd and cannot for a moment satisfy the really philosophical or inquiring mind.

Let me, then, give a different answer to this question, and see who will demur.

Sexual purity, I will say, is that kind of relation, whatever it be, between the sexes which contributes in the highest degree to their mutual health and happiness, taking into account the remote as well as the immediate results.

If this definition is accepted, then clearly the whole field is open to new, radical, and scientific investigation, physiological, psychological, and economical, infinitely broader and more thorough than the world has ever yet even thought of applying; and he must be a fearful egotist who, in the present stage of our experience, can venture to affirm that he knows the whole truth, the final word of science, on the subject. One thing only is certain,—namely, that absolute freedom, accompanied, too, by the temporary evils of an ignorant use of that freedom, is a condition precedent even to furnish the facts upon which to reason safely at all upon the matter. Any settlement of the question by us now would have hardly as much value as a decision made in the heart of Russia upon the best form of human government. No pretension can be made that purity, in the sense in which I use the term, has ever yet been attained by laws to enforce it. Prostitution, in marriage and out of it, and solitary vice, characterize society as it is.

If the workings of freedom should prove that purity in this sense is attainable otherwise, this argument in behalf of compulsory marriage fails. On the contrary, if freedom is forever prohibited hereafter, as it forever has been prohibited heretofore, how is it to be known that such a result would not come of it? One portion of mankind believe there would, and another that there would not, while the opportunity is refused to submit the question to the test of experiment and fact.

The second point is the care and culture of children. Certainly small boast can be made of the success of mankind hitherto in the practice of that art, when statistics inform us that nearly one-half the whole human family die in infancy! And when nine-tenths of the remainder are merely grown-up abortions, half made before birth, and worse distorted and perverted by ignorant mismanagement and horrible abuses afterward! Alas! Do children get cared for and reared in the family arrangement now with any skill, any true science, any just appreciation of the real nature of that sublime but delicate task, which demands more precise knowledge, more refined instincts, and more prudence and judgment than any other? Do our existing domestic institutions commend themselves by their fruits, or are the wholesale infanticides and the dreadful tortures of childhood now prevalent of a kind, the bare repetition of which will cause the ears of a later and wiser generation to tingle? Is it not possible that our most cherished social usages may be as terrible to them to contemplate as the hecatombs of political murders by the Neapolitan Government are at this day to us?

Suppose, now, that a future experience should demonstrate the fact that, of children reared in unitary nurseries, conducted by skilled and professional nurses, matrons, and physiologists, the mothers—except those engaged by choice in the nursery—being, at most, within reach for the purpose of suckling their infants at

given hours, not one in a hundred died during the first five years; suppose that, by such an arrangement, the same labor that now requires the time of fifty women could be so systemised as to occupy no more than that of five, leaving forty-five persons free for productive industry in other departments; suppose that the children so reared grew up with larger frames and sounder constitutions, brighter intellects, livelier affections, and superior faculties in every way; suppose that all this were so obvious and incontestable that no one ventured to dispute it, and so attractive that hardly any mother would desire or venture to attempt the isolated rearing of her babe,—what would become of this second ground upon which the family institution is maintained by force of arms as the sole means of appropriate guardianship for childhood?

The third and last. basis of the family is the protection and maintenance of women themselves. Here again it does not seem to me that the system in vogue, by which the husband and father earns all the money and doles it out in charitable pittances to wife and daughters, who are kept as helpless dependents, in ignorance of business and the responsibilities of life, has achieved any decided title to our exalted admiration. The poor stipendiaries of paternal or marital munificence are liable at any time to be thrown upon their own resources, with no resources to be thrown upon. The absence of all prior necessity for the exercise of prevision unfitting them for self-support and protection, and the system affording them none but the most precarious assurances, their liabilities are terrible, and daily experiences are cruel in the extreme. At the best, and while the protection endures, its results are mental imbecility and bodily disease. There is hardly one woman in ten in our midst who knows from year's end to year's end what it is to enjoy even tolerable health. The few who, despite the system, attain some development, are tortured by the consciousness and the mortification of their dependancy, and the perpetual succession of petty annoyances incident to it; of which their lordly companions, self-gratulatory for their own intentions of kindness, are profoundly unconscious. Shut up to the necessity of this continuous and exhausting endurance, wives have the same motives that slaves have for professing contentment, and smile deceitfully while the heart swells indignantly and the tear trembles in the eye. Man complains habitually of the waywardness and perversity of woman, and never suspects that he himself, and his own false relations to her, are the key to the thousand apparent contradictions in her deportment and character. The last thing that the husband is likely to know, in marriage as it is, is the real state of the heart that throbs next him as he lays his head upon his own pillow. Woman, as well as the slave, must first be wholly free before she can afford to take the risk to speak freely. She dare not utter boldly her own complaint, and she will even denounce openly, while she prays fervently in secret for the God-speed of the friend who does it for her.

The great lesson for the world to learn is that human beings do not need to be taken

care of. What they do need is such conditions of justice and freedom and friendly coöperation that they can take care of themselves. Provided for by another, and subject to his will as the return tribute, they pine, and sicken, and die. This is true equally of women as of men; as true of wives as it is of vassals or serfs. Our whole existing marital system is the house of bondage and the slaughter-house of the female sex. Whether its evils are inherent or incidental, whether they belong to the essence or the administration of the institution, whether they are remediable without or only by means of revolution, are the questions that have now to be discussed.

Suppose, then, that in some future day, under the operation of equity, and with such provision as has been hinted at for the care of children, women find it as easy to earn an independent living as men; and that, by the same arrangement, the expense of rearing a child to the early age at which, by other corresponding arrangements, it is able to earn its own living, is reduced to a minimum, -a slight consideration for either parent. Suppose that suggestions of economy have substituted the large unitary edifice for the isolated home, and that, freed by these changes from the care of the nursery and the household, woman is enabled, even while a mother, to select whatever calling or profession suits her tastes, and pursue it with devotion, or vary it at will; and suppose that, under this system of living, universal health returns to bloom upon her cheek, and that she develops new and unexpected powers of mind, exquisiteness of taste, and charms of person; that, in fine, while relieving the other sex entirely from the responsibility and burden of her support, she proves incontestably her equality with man in points where it has been denied, and her superiority in a thousand beautiful endowments which freedom alone has enabled her to discover and exhibit,-what, under these circumstances, becomes of the third and last necessity for the maintenance of the institution of exclusive and perpetual and compulsory marriage?

Carry this supposition still further; assume, for illustration, that in freedom the tendency to perpetual conjugal partnership should vindicate itself, as supposed by Mr. James, as the natural law of the subject; or contrariwise, let it be assumed that a well-ordered variety in the love relations is shown by experience to be just as essential to the highest development of the human being, both spiritually and materially, as variety in food, occupation, or amusement; or suppose, to render the case still stronger, that some new and striking pathological fact is discovered and put beyond doubt; for example, that a specific disease, at present a scourge of mankind, like consumption or scrofula, is wholly due to the want of certain subtile magnetic influences, which can only come from a more unrestrained contact and freedom of association between the sexes. Let us add that just that freedom of contact and association are found to moderate the passions instead of inflaming them, and so to contribute, in the highest degree, to a general purity of life and the prevalence of the most fraternal and tender regard. Suppose, again, that woman,

when free, should exhibit an inherent, God-given tendency to accept only the noblest and most highly endowed of the opposite sex to be the recipients of her choicest favors and the sires of her offspring, rejecting the males of a lower degree, as the females of some species of the lower animals (who enjoy the freedom that woman does not) are known to do; and that the grand societary fact should appear in the result that by this means Nature has provided for an infinitely higher development of the race. Suppose, indeed, finally, that the freedom of woman is found by experience to have in every way a healthful, restraining, and elevating influence, in the same degree that the freedom of man, to subjugate her, as in polygamic nations, has had an influence to degrade and deteriorate the race; and that, generally, God and nature have evidently delegated to woman the supremacy in the whole affectional realm of human affairs, as they have consigned it to man in the intellectual, a function she could never begin rightly to perform until first freed herself from the trammels of conventionalism, the false sanctities of superstition and custom. Suppose all this to have been thoroughly well-established both by reason and fact, what then becomes of this last ground of necessity for the institution of legal marriage, or of marriage at all?

When purity, in its best sense, should be far better understood, and more prevalent without it than with it, and women and children better protected and provided for, where would be the continued demand for the maintenance of the now sacred and inviolable family institution? What, indeed, would render it impossible that that institution should fall into contempt, as other institutions, hallowed in former times by equally sacred associations and beautiful idealizations, have done?

Who can foretell that isolated families may not come hereafter to be regarded as hot-beds of selfishness and narrow prejudice against the outside world, separating and destroying the unity of the human race; the same thing as between neighbors that patriotic prejudices and antipathies and "mountains interposed" are between nations? Who shall say that it may not, perchance, be quoted upon us one or more generations hence, as some evidence of our barbarism, that a rich and religious citizen could sit down in quiet and happiness, surrounded by his wife and children, in the midst of comfort and luxury, bless God for his abundant mercies, and cite the Scripture that "He who provides not for his own household hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel," while wretched women and babes, with sensibilities as keen and capacities for happiness as great as those possessed by his own sweet lambs, sit in their desolate houses within a stone's throw of his own aristocratic door, shivering with cold, pinched with hunger, and trembling with apprehension of the sharp knock and gruff voice of a landlord's agent, come to thrust them out of even those miserable mockeries of homes? Who can assert with confidence that a larger conception of the brotherhood of humanity than now prevails—except as a traditional reminiscence of the teachings of Christ or the